Monday Noon ~ thefrontpagecover

TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~  
The Self-Appointed Digital Arbiters of Truth
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Mark Alexander  
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Nasrallah warns Israel could be 
‘wiped out’ in war between US and Iran
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by timesofisrael.com ~ The head of the Hezbollah terror group warned Friday that Israel would be drawn into any war between the US and Iran and could be “wiped out” in such a conflict... “Iran is able to bombard Israel with ferocity and force,” Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview broadcast on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television. “When the Americans understand that this war could wipe out Israel, they will reconsider,” Nasrallah said. His comments came amid soaring tensions between the US and Iran and just hours after US House of Representatives voted to restrict US President Donald Trump’s ability to attack Iran, voicing fear that his hawkish policies are pushing toward a needless war. It was not immediately clear if Nasrallah was referring to Iran’s arsenal of long-range missiles or the tens of thousands of rockets and missiles that Iran has supplied the Lebanese Hezbollah. Earlier in the interview Nasrallah said his Iran-backed group had significantly improved its military capabilities since the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. “Our weapons have been developed in both quality and quantity, we have precision missiles and drones,” he said in the interview to mark 13 years since the war. During the interview, a chuckling Nasrallah referred to a map of Israel and pointed to strategic military and civilian targets which he said Hezbollah could hit, including Ben Gurion Airport, arms depots, petrochemical and water desalinization plants, and the Ashdod port. He claimed that an attack on Haifa’s ammonia storage tanks — which have been emptied out — would cause tens of thousands of casualties. He also specified that his missiles could hit the southern Israeli city of Eilat on the Red Sea. The question would be “which of us would send the other back to the Stone Age,” he declared...  Nasralllah falled to mention if Iran is destroyed .
Here Are 6 Ways a New Report Devastates 
the $15 Minimum Wage
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by Rachel Greszler 
dailysignal.com } ~ Just in time for next week’s likely House vote on a federal $15 minimum wage, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has come out with a caustic report on the consequences of the policy... The report confirms what even liberal economists caution: A $15 minimum wage would “risk undesirable and unintended consequences” and lead to a survival-of-the-fittest labor market, where only the highest-skilled workers come out on top. Democrats are under the illusion that the government can force employers to artificially increase wages with no adverse consequences for American workers. But that’s like saying the government could double families’ mortgage and rent payments without any consequence. Here are six ways this new report exposes the minimum wage proposal as bad policy. 1. It would be a job-killer. The Congressional Budget Office report estimated that a $15 minimum wage would lead to 1.3 million lost jobs by the year 2025, with job losses rising over time due to compounding negative impacts. The exact number of job losses are highly uncertain, but the report says losses would most likely range between zero and 3.7 million, with a not-insignificant chance that losses could exceed 3.7 million. A 2011 Heritage Foundation estimate was even bleaker. It estimated a $15 minimum wage would lead to 7 million lost jobs. Some groups have tried to minimize this part of the picture, focusing instead on the 17 million workers who currently earn below $15 that would receive an income boost. But this simply means that for every 13 workers who would get a wage boost, one worker would lose their job entirely. 2. It would create a survival-of-the-fittest labor market.  3. It would expedite the pace of automation.  4. It would drive up prices.  5. It would shrink the economy, and shrink family incomes.  6. It would drive up deficits, inflation, and interest rates...  https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/07/11/here-are-6-ways-a-new-report-devastates-the-15-minimum-wage/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=theinsider&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTldNd01qVmxOV0UwWWpRMiIsInQiOiJwcGc5eEZtUHBBRmsra2I1Q2k0bzJ1NGt3OHB0Y3NuY2phSlBvckZGVFNWcUt6V1BHYVZZZExFbndPWFV4T2o5RmlGK01lU1FZV044NjFjS1Q3QldoSlVXSDIzMEwzQ1dRb3VQQUxTWlpOaFlNQlFxUEhkVzljVmVuY28wYkpjdCJ9   
Armed Activist Hurling Molotov Cocktails 
at ICE Facility Shot Killed by Police
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by sundance
theconservativetreehouse.com }~ This is an example of what happens when politicians and far-left activists push a false narrative that ICE facilities are comparable to concentration camps... An obviously unstable man armed with a rifle attempts to blow up an ICE detention facility in Tacoma Washington following protests hours earlier. An armed man was fatally shot early Saturday during a confrontation with police after he hurled incendiary devices at a Washington state immigration detention center, Tacoma police said. The shooting occurred about 4 a.m. local time outside the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Northwest Detention Center, where the gunman attempted to set the building and parked cars on fire, according to police spokeswoman Loretta Cool. Authorities did not immediately identify the gunman, saying in the statement the “medical examiner will release the identity of the victim when it is appropriate.” The assault on the privately-run immigrant detention facility came amid protests over ICE plans to begin the previously postponed raids across the country on Sunday. The goal is the arrest of thousands of migrant families who already have court orders to be removed, according to US officials. A peaceful rally against the raids at the Tacoma detention center had ended about six hours before the shooting, Cool said.  […]
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Defense bill in trouble thanks to partisan 
political games and posturing
By James Jay Carafano  
foxnews.com } ~ This week, the House of Representatives will finalize its version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)... the bill that establishes how much we will invest in our military and the policies that direct how the Pentagon spends that money. Odds are good that the lower chamber will make a mess of it—and set the stage for a historic failure. Since the Cold War, when lawmakers first started writing NDAAs, Congress has compiled a great track record. Year after year, it has hammered out a defense authorization, regardless of how contentious the political infighting raged under the dome of the Capitol. In some years, the partisan rancor was so bad, the two parties couldn’t agree on a budget or pass new appropriations bills. Instead, they resorted to “continuing resolutions” that merely carried over the previous year’s spending levels to the new fiscal year. But even in those years, lawmakers were able to put aside the partisan vitriol and agree to a national policy for defense. Now, unfortunately, that record run of achievement may be broken. That should be unthinkable. The Constitution charges the federal government with a sacred duty: to provide for the common defense. And there’s certainly no shortage of threats that demand a strong common defense. Iran is acting up. China is on the march. Kim is watching. Putin is waiting to pounce. This is not the time for Congress to put political posturing ahead of national security. Yet there is evidence that the NDAA is in deep trouble. Item one: A possibly insurmountable partisan divide in the House. Historically, lawmakers have been able to come together, work through their differences and hammer out an NDAA both parties can support. The good news is: that’s exactly what happened in the Senate. Two weeks ago, the upper chamber passed its version of the NDAA with strong, bi-partisan support. The vote was 86-6. That bi-partisan spirit is conspicuously lacking in the House, however. Two weeks ago, the House Armed Services Committee passed out its version of the bill on a highly partisan vote. Only two Republicans backed the committee’s vision...
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From the Mediterranean to Mexico, Capt. 
Pia Klemp Believes Rescuing Refugees 
is Woth Facing Prison Time
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by Camille Baker
theintercept.com } ~ In the early morning hours of November 6, 2017, the Sea-Watch 3, a stocky search-and-rescue ship with an azure hull and yellow masts... was patrolling the Libyan coast. At 6:31 a.m. a call came in: A much smaller and much less seaworthy craft, a rubber, inflatable pontoon boat carrying between 130 and 150 migrants attempting the treacherous voyage to Europe, had begun to sink nearby. The Sea-Watch 3, which is operated by the German NGO Sea-Watch, was one of several vessels that convened at the scene that morning. Besides a Libyan coast guard vessel, a French army ship hovered in the periphery, and a Portuguese patrol aircraft and an Italian navy helicopter followed from above. Nevertheless, in the next three hours, over 20 people would slip between the waves to their deaths. The Libyan coast guard reached the sinking pontoon boat first, but did not move to rescue the half-dozen people scattered and drowning in the water nearby. It radioed to the Sea-Watch 3 to keep away. It did not lower a dinghy into the water to save the people being tossed about in the swells. Its crew stood on deck, many simply watching. One man filmed on his cellphone. This was par for the course; the captain on board the Sea-Watch 3 that day, a German woman in her early 30s named Pia Klemp, refers to the “so-called Libyan coast guard.” When we spoke last week via Skype, she described the Libyan coast guard as essentially Libyan militias, a product of the country’s violent civil war, which have been empowered by the European Union to do everything possible to prevent migrants from reaching the shores of Europe. The Libyan coast guard was “trying to pull people from the sinking rubber boat on to their decks to kidnap them to bring them back to Libya,” Klemp told me of that morning. “We could see them whipping these people, threatening them, shouting at them.”  Under Klemp’s direction, the Sea-Watch 3 lowered its two dinghies and began to pull people from the water. As the European vessels stood by, according to Klemp, as well as a video of the scene analyzed by Forensic Architecture, the Libyan coast guard interfered with its rescue, at one point hurling potatoes at the Sea-Watch boats. Nonetheless, 59 times that day, the Sea-Watch crew pulled a person to safety...  https://theintercept.com/2019/07/10/mediterranean-migrant-rescue-pia-klemp/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c57f363398-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_07_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e00a5122d3-c57f363398-131896129   
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The Self-Appointed Digital Arbiters of Truth
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Mark Alexander:  In 1996, when a small group of friends launched our email digest, “The Federalist,” which we would rename a few years later “The Patriot Post,” we were entering completely uncharted territory.

There were no other publications on the Internet for us to use as a template, and frankly, I thought this entrepreneurial First Amendment exercise might not make it through its first year. But with encouragement from a handful of the nation’s leading conservative thinkers at the time, we did indeed. Even though email wasn’t yet a ubiquitous means of communication, we had gained nearly 5,000 subscribers and were operating in the black!

We also did a few things that were entirely different from other publications — things that still set us apart today.

First, we chose an unconventional business model that was for-profit (so IRS rules wouldn’t impose editorial constraints on our political or policy analysis), but supported by donations, so we could offer our publication at no charge as a service to students, military personnel, and others with limited income. Today, we are sustained by the generosity of our grassroots donors and take no  funding from any political benefactor, special-interest group, or parent organization.

Second, we also refuse any funding from advertisers. As our “About” page notes: “Our website pages and emails are certified ‘Ad Free.’ Because we do not depend on a single penny of ad revenue, we focus solely on providing you content that is actually newsworthy — worthy of your time — rather than constantly churning the ubiquitous topics that now dominate the mainstream media’s relentless 24/7 recycled spin. … We do not accept advertising to ensure our advocacy and editorial content is not restrained by commercial influence — as is the case with all mass media outlets. Thus, you will note our website and email editions are free of advertising clutter.”

Third, as also noted, “We rely on reputable sources and never post the sensationalist non-news ‘click bait’ that now infests the pages of political news sites on both the Left and Right. Nor will you find any of the ‘fake news’ fabrications and editorial tripe driven by pursuit of market share that determines the advertising revenues on which commercial news websites depend.”

And last, we chose to honor our nation’s founders by publishing under a pseudonym. As noted on our “About” page: “As was the case with The Federalist (Papers) in 1787, the premier resource for understanding the Liberty and Rule of Law enshrined in our Republic’s Constitution, and from which we derive much of our constitutionally constructionist editorial inspiration, The Patriot Post is published under the pseudonym ‘Publius.’”

The Federalist Papers were published by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay and provided a detailed explanation of the meaning of our Constitution in support for its ratification. But they chose to publish pseudonymously because it was the timeless message of Liberty enshrined in our Constitution that they were promoting — not themselves. Today, in a mainstream-media marketplace built largely around “celebrity journalists,” we still choose to promote Liberty and not personalities.

Some of our grassroots editors and contributors choose to be listed by pseudonym for the same reason, humility, which is an uncommon attribute in today’s personality-centric commercial media market. But then, none of us consider ourselves “professional journalists,” nor aspire to be that. Many of our writers hold positions in the fields they write about, which is to say they actually know their subject.

Since our inception, we’ve grown significantly. While we have loyal readers among key executive- and legislative-branch staff, as well as DC think tanks, our mission remains first and foremost, to provide the timeless message of Liberty to grassroots American Patriots far outside the Beltway — those Americans who constitute who we really are as a nation.

In recent years, even while endeavoring to maintain a low profile, our success has put us in the crosshairs of  Leftmedia protagonists (or is that antagonists?) hell-bent on silencing those who refuse to comport with their political and cultural agendas.

The most perilous hazards to free speech on the Web, history’s greatest First Amendment platform, are not Facebook and YouTube censors (though they are certainly a threat), but the media “fact checkers” and well-funded organizations that have positioned themselves, benignly they claim, as the digital gatekeepers of truth. And they are the ones pulling the social-media censorship strings.

Not content to dominate virtually every news medium on the planet, Leftmedia outlets have increasingly promoted their “fact-checking” arms as a way to establish themselves as the arbiters of what is “true.” Increasingly, many of these “fact-checker” assessments masquerade as fact but amount to what we coined years ago as leftist “Dezinformatsiya,” the old Soviet term for disinformation.

Of course these checkers’ “ratings” of truthfulness are inevitably subjective and therefore irrevocably shaped by their own bias. Consequently, the media blacklists created by these self-appointed arbiters pose a greater threat to Truth and to freedom of speech than the “fake news” they claim to be guarding against.

Recently, The Patriot Post was rated by an organization called NewsGuard, which provides a browser extension to rate news sources. It’s now a standard feature in Microsoft’s Edge browser, and it’s also available for Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.

Launched in 2018 by some reputable veteran mainstream -media journalists — Steve Brill of Court TV and former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz — NewsGuard employs an array of journalist watchdogs tasked with evaluating news sites on numerous criteria to help users determine the reliability of what they’re reading and, conversely, steer clear of “fake news.”

Let’s stipulate for the record that the idea of an objective accreditation organization isn’t bad in and of itself. It’s akin to Underwriters Laboratories, the familiar “UL” brand that certifies, validates, tests, verifies, inspects, audits, advises, and educates regarding all manner of consumer products. But UL uses well-established and objective criteria.

NewsGuard seems to utilize objective standards. It uses a simple color system of green checkmarks and red Xs to quickly show how a site measures up on the nine factors  deemed most important to credibility and transparency. Some items are weighted more than others. For example, it’s worth more points to steer clear of unverifiable or suspect content, and to clearly distinguish between news and opinion. A site’s total score out of 100 determines whether the overall rating is green or red, and each site is then given a fuller “Nutrition Label” that explains its rating.

The extension also has an orange smiley face that helpfully explains when a site — like our staff favorite,  The Babylon Bee — is satire or humor. Other sites like YouTube and Wikipedia receive a blue “i” indicating that content is user-generated and is thus subject to inaccuracies.

The standards are solid, and they help define what constitutes respectable journalism, but there are vulnerabilities. Commercial gatekeepers and arbiters of truth are at risk of becoming politicized and failing their own standards of objective assessment. The assessors aren’t machines, and they are therefore subject to the same human biases as the rest of us. The potential for subjectivity to infect an objective rating system is always present. Arguably, much of what the Leftmedia outlets run as news is steeped in opinion.

A few NewsGuard assessments suffice to illustrate the point.

FoxNews.com gets three red Xs — for allegedly failing to regularly correct or clarify errors, disclose ownership and financing, or reveal who’s in charge. Interestingly, the overall rating is still a green checkmark.

Meanwhile, CNN.com somehow receives a complete slate of green checkmarks. We’ve spent decades now documenting CNN’s brand of fake news. In just the last 18 months, this includes staging an anti-Second Amendment rally, running misinformation on AR-15s, airing multiple false stories about President Donald Trump, and joining in the media lynch mob that viciously attacked a group of Catholic high-school students with a dishonestly edited video clip.

But other examples raise more questions about objectivity.

BuzzFeed News, which to its credit does have some reputable journalists, has a perfect rating. The site is best known for “lolcats” and “listicles,” but its news division should also be known for leaking the scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton-funded and completely unverified anti-Trump “Russian dossier,” breaking a false report about Michael Cohen, and setting up a fake website to impersonate economist and pro-Second Amendment journalist John Lott.

BuzzFeed’s violations of the most rudimentary journalistic integrity didn’t merit a reduction in NewsGuard’s rating.

(Coincidentally, The Patriot Post is currently the target of BuzzFeed’s resident fake-news expert (rich irony noted) and his colleague at Syracuse University. More on their motives and objectives soon, but suffice it to say that when the substance or merits of a media outlet’s content can’t be challenged, attempt to undermine their credibility.)

Moreover, how is it that the big news organizations propagating the demonstrably fabricated Russian collusion delusion for the last two years are rated anything other than “biased” for relentlessly promoting the Democrat Party’s political agenda?

The Daily Signal and National Review, two solidly conservative sites, receive all green checkmarks, so, to be fair, NewsGuard doesn’t reflexively downgrade right-leaning websites. But, predictably, it appears to tilt left.

For the record, The Patriot Post is rated well by NewsGuard (at least until we publish this review). Our rating was nicked because, as noted above, some of our writers choose to publish pseudonymously under the “Publius” model. What we’ve always done for reasons of humility (and in some cases, security), is confusing to the journalism experts. Promoting ideas over personalities is an enigmatic standard.

All said, I note that the the evaluation process was helpful because there is not a “professional journalist” among our ranks – by design, and the critical review and advice we received from career journalists at NewsGuard helped us tighten up our operation.

However, regarding objectivity evaluations, totally absent from media-rater questions is one critical criterion that should be weighted as highly as any other: “Does your news site depend on advertising revenue?”

That key question isn’t asked by NewsGuard, Poynter Institute, or any of the other ostensible arbiters of truth, like the insidious Southern Poverty Law Center, which, incredibly, is still cited as a credible organization by certain major media outlets.

Clearly, the question about advertising revenue isn’t asked because virtually every media outlet would receive a red X, while we’d be in the green!

Make no mistake, there’s nothing “transparent” about how MSM editors select and treat news based on its potential impact on their lifeblood, advertising revenue. As I noted previously, The Patriot Post does not accept advertising to ensure our advocacy and editorial content is free of commercial influence.

Moreover, nor do the raters ask how much information media outlets collect on their users or subscribers, or whether they sell or share what should be private information. Again, virtually every media outlet would receive a red X — but not The Patriot Post.

While I view NewsGuard as a reputable organization (and for-profit, by the way), the other “truth arbiters,” especially the media “fact checkers” on the payrolls of Leftmedia outlets, who are clearly endeavoring to constrict the speech and reach of organizations that do not agree with their political and social agendas.

And a final note: At some point, once even the reputable news evaluators are well embedded as the go-to source for such evaluations, what questions might they add to their criterion, which require compliance with their political and social agendas in order to maintain a favorable rating?

Bottom line, who will rate the raters?  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/64202?mailing_id=4415&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4415&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

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